1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to providing a system and method for telecommunication system trace diagnostics and, more particularly, to a system and method that encodes and decodes telecommunication system tracer information from any number of a plurality of tracer protocols.
2. Background Description
The swift advance of telecommunications technology over the latter half of the twentieth century promises a future in which a broad suite of services is available to the network user. These services cover a wide spectrum of activities encompassing traditional telephony and computer data transmission as well as the integration of these activities. The future user of telecommunications technology can expect digital telephony, high-speed data transmission, real-time video, high fidelity audio, and the combination of these activities into multimedia products all to be readily available over a network that interconnects users throughout the world.
In the first half of the twentieth century telephony architecture developed along the lines of a circuit-switched network providing audio communication to potentially every person in the world. Then, Private Branch eXchanges (PBXs) that provide a local telephone network within a building but that also retain access to the larger global network were developed. PBXs represent an example of a network within a network.
With the advent of the personal computer in the 1970's, development of approaches and architectures leading to the internetworking of computers in a manner analogous to the internetworking of telephones was begun. Motivated by the desire to distribute resources among users who may communicate with each other, Local Area Networks (LANs) allowing a local interconnection of computers were developed. They may be thought of as being analogous to the PBXs. The recognition that users within one LAN may wish to communicate with users in a separate LAN led to the development of Wide Area Networks (WANs), which may be thought of as a network of networks. Such networking of personal computers has led to new user services such as electronic mail and electronic file sharing.
Because telecommunications equipment, including everything from routers and switches to telephones and personal computers, comprises a wide range of purposes, the telecommunications industry has formulated the Open Systems Interface (OSI) model to provide a basis for developing and coordinating standards for internetworking systems developed by a variety of vendors/users. This approach models the telecommunications process as a structure of seven layers. These layers address, in turn, the physical connection, the data link, network functions, transport and data flow, session management, presentation, and finally the application, as basic features of an end-to-end communication process. The basis for the workability of a telecommunications network is the set of rules for communicating known as the protocol. Various protocols exist for each layer of the OSI model and are necessitated by the desire to connect different physical devices (e.g., telephones, personal computers) to multiple pipelines (e.g., copper wire, fiber optics) according to a variety of switching approaches (e.g., circuit switching, packet switching) with different performance criteria (e.g., low latency for telephone, low error rate for data exchange) for a wide variety of end-user applications.
In addition to the user-based network functions (e.g., transmission of voice or data), each network requires a system for controlling the network in a fashion transparent to the user. For example, when a person picks up the telephone to place a call, a signal is sent to the telephone company to alert it that a user wishes to make a call, and a response is sent back to the user in the form of a dial tone to indicate that the required network resources are available. This communication, which is essentially invisible to the caller, is an example of the kind of control functions that are necessarily implemented in the operation of any network. For the telephone network, the control system is known as Signaling System Number 7 (SS7). As implemented, SS7 comprises a suite of protocols, each of which serves a specific function in controlling the network. For example, the protocol named the Message Transfer Part (MTP) insures that traffic flows through the network by redirecting traffic around failed or overloaded nodes. Another SS7 protocol is the Transaction Capabilities Part (TCAP), which is used in querying any databases that are utilized in controlling the network. Because of its nature as a control system, SS7 is not necessarily limited to use in telephone networks. SS7 and the techniques associated with it are proving useful in more general telecommunications networks. It is clear that network control is an important and potentially complex aspect of telecommunications networking operations.
A critical function in the control of any network, be it a LAN, a PBX, or the Internet, is the management of network resources in order to diagnose and troubleshoot problems, to monitor system performance and to assess traffic patterns and loads. One of the tools commonly available to assist the network engineer in fulfilling a part of this management function is a software application generically known as a tracer. A tracer is a software program that outputs a record of network events (i.e., a trace) in order to aid the engineer in troubleshooting network operations. Due to the variety of technologies that contribute to a modern telecommunications network, a network engineer may be required to utilize a broad array of tracer programs in order to troubleshoot and diagnose problems that can occur in the various aspects of the network. A tracer used to query a telephone network necessarily obtains different information than a tracer used to query a LAN. Moreover, because a given type of network (e.g., LAN) may be manufactured by multiple vendors, each of whom may choose different protocols (unless constrained to the use of industry standard protocols, such as the SS7 suite of protocols) for use within the network, tracer programs must interact with a wide variety of telecommunications protocols. The network engineer must be conversant with the operation and utilization of many tracer programs interacting with a variety of protocols in order to implement the required network management functions.
Typically, the outputs from tracer programs that execute on Network Elements (NEs) are in hexadecimal or binary format and can comprise a plurality of telecommunications protocols. Current practice in decoding the outputs from tracer programs into readable format using a decoder software program generally provides only limited decoding. Thus, a decoder program may be written to decode the SS7 protocol suite or a part thereof Similarly, a decoder program may be written to decode the ISDN protocol or a part thereof, and should proprietary protocols on a NE exist, then there may be other decoder programs to handle the decoding of those proprietary protocols are parts thereof. The net result in troubleshooting or diagnosing a problem on a NE using tracers may well require the use of a variety of tracers, none of which provide an integrated view of all the protocols that a particular tracer may use. Thus, current practice does not provide for unification of all tracers into a common tool set, neither does current practice provide for the integration of the plurality of protocols that a particular tracer may use. Unification of multiple tracers supported on a given NE into a common tool set would provide the advantage of a coherent and consistent display presentation across all such tracers in addition to reducing training requirements. Further, an integrated display of a plurality of telecommunications protocols that can occur in any given tracer output would provide the advantage of a single view of all tracer events in context. Thus, with integration, the flow of tracer events in relationship with each other will facilitate and potentially make the diagnostic process more efficient.
What is needed therefore is a system and method by which any number of network tracer programs utilizing possibly multiple telecommunications protocols can be unified and integrated into one trace diagnostic network management tool that is both flexible, in order to accommodate existing tracers and protocols, and extensible, in order to accommodate as yet undeveloped tracers and protocols.